Manoel de Oliveira, Pensive Filmmaker Who Made Up for Lost Time, Is Dead at 106

New York Times

April 3, 2015

Manoel de Oliveira, an acclaimed Portuguese filmmaker whose career began in the silent era, flowered in the 1970s with the end of authoritarian rule in his country, and ended with a surge of productivity extending into his 11th decade, died Thursday at his home in Oporto, Portugal. He was 106.

For much of the past 25 years Oliveira was known among cinema fans as the world’s oldest active filmmaker. Unable to work for decades under the repressive right-wing government of António de Oliveira Salazar, who came to power in 1932, Oliveira started making up for lost time in his 60s, at an age when most directors are entering their creative twilight.

Almost as old as cinema itself, Oliveira often seemed like a filmmaker out of time, or perhaps of many times, a 20th-century modernist drawn to the themes and traditions of earlier eras. He was known for ruminative, melancholic, often eccentric movies about grand subjects like the nature of love and the ever-present specter of death.

Critics noted that his age, combined with his belated coming of age as an artist, granted him a certain freedom. Reviewing his 1998 movie “Inquietude,” the French journal Cahiers du Ciné said of Oliveira, “He is sovereign, free, unique, perched high on a tightrope no one else can reach, defying the laws of gravity and above all the rules of cinematic decorum and commerce.”

Manoel Cândido Pinto de Oliveira was born Dec. 11, 1908, in Oporto. His father was an industrialist who owned a dry-goods factory and later built a hydroelectric plant. Oliveira dropped out of college and, before turning to filmmaking, compiled an impressive résumé as an athlete. He was a pole vaulter, diver and race car driver and even briefly performed in a trapeze act.

After a number of other short documentaries, he made his first feature, “Aniki-Bóbó” (1942), a children’s parable often considered a precursor of neorealism, then struggled for decades to get projects approved by the government-run film commission.

During that time, Oliveira operated a farm and vineyard that his wife, Maria Isabel, had inherited. He would come to regard this forced absence from filmmaking as an important incubation period.

“I had time for a long and profound reflection about the artistic nature of cinema,” he said in an interview with the New York Times in 2008.

Between 1931 and 1970, Oliveira made only two features and a handful of shorts. But as the Salazar regime entered its final days — it was overthrown in 1974 — he wasted no time putting his long-gestating ideas into practice.

Oliveira became a pre-eminent filmmaker among European critics with a series of movies made between 1971 and 1981: “The Past and the Present,” “Benilde or the Virgin Mother,” “Doomed Love” and “Francisca.” They came to be known as his “tetralogy of frustrated love.” Set in different periods (from the early 19th century to the 1970s), based on plays or novels, all deal with obsessive passions that are inevitably thwarted by external forces.

Oliveira started receiving lifetime achievement awards in his late 70s — from the Venice Film Festival in 1985 and the Locarno Film Festival in 1991. These honors would come to seem premature, as he showed no signs of slowing down.

There was renewed interest in Oliveira’s work when he turned 100, not least because he was the only major filmmaker in the history of the medium alive and working in his centennial year.